Tonight was the Time 100 Gala, where Time Magazine celebrates 100 of the most influential people in the world today. This year, three religious leaders are included.

What Richard Cizik, Patriarch Bartholomew I, and the Dalai Lama have in common is that they’ve all made headlines from leading green movements within their respective faith traditions.

Richard Cizik

Cizik, an ordained Evangelical Presbyterian miniser and head of the Office of Governmental Affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals fights global warming by quoting the Bible and calling on congregations to practice “creation care.” Cizik challenges conservative evangelicals to recognize climate change as a serious threat to the health of the planet.

Cizik also makes friends with scientists such as Nobel Peace Prize winner Eric Chivian, ignoring a once perceived barrier between the religious and scientific communities.

Patriarch Bartholomew I

The leader of Eastern Orthodox Christians appeals faithfully to his ancient religious tradition to claim that ecological questions are essentially spiritual ones. Bartholomew appeals to the theology of his revered predecessors, claiming that creation bears the glory and revelation of God, to call for greater environmental responsibility among Orthodox Christians.

Rowan Williams, the head of the Anglican Church, writes, “Probably more than any other religious leader from any faith, Patriarch Bartholomew has kept open this spiritual dimension of environmentalism.”

The Dalai Lama

The Dalai Lama’s infectious laugh in spite of chaos and oppression has puzzled some and inspired many. Under this surface, however, is a desire for a more peaceful human existence. This includes a more holistic approach to how we spend our time on the planet.

“We are the superior species on Earth but also the biggest troublemakers,” he once told Deepak Chopra.

Chopra recalls a piece of advice the Dalai Lama once gave him: “Without relying on religion, we look to common sense, common experience and the findings of science for understanding,”

Imagine this level of calm compassion practiced by all.

More on the Cizik, Bartholomew, and the Dalai Lama:

• Candidates Jump Through the Hoops of Religious Voters
• “Green Patriarch” Celebrates Leap Year Birthday
• Americans are Stupid When it Comes to Global Warming

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Earth Day fell during Passover this year causing Jews to reflect on how an important tradition offers some wisdom about environmental challenges. Rabbi Jeff Sultar, director of The Green Menorah Program at the Shalom Center, took the three necessary elements of the Passover Seder and used them to symbolize the struggle with personal, economic, or political “pharaohs” putting limitations on a healthy planet.

He advocates holding “street seders” this year during Passover. These seders are part religious observance, part political demonstration. Possible locations include regional E.P.A. offices to demand they allow states to raise emissions standards above federal standards, ExxonMobil offices around the country, and congressional offices to urge politicians to pass “America’s Climate Security Act.”

The three important parts of a seder that need to be explained by the host are

• the Passover sacrifice, symbolized by a shank bone (or yam for vegetarian seders). Rabbi Sultar writes that the sacrifice of a lamb was an act of defiance for the Israelites because the Egyptians worshiped the lamb. Participants in a street seder are to call out politicians and corporations for their worship of oil and hardened hearts on issues such as climate change. There are also to look inward at ways they can consume less.

• the Matzeh, which is crisp, flat, unleavened bread. Jews are forbidden to have any chametz, which is literally any kind of grain mixed with leaven and allowed to swell up. Sultar points out that Chasidic teachers understand chametz metaphorically. They ask everyone during Passover to remove everything unnecessary in their lives. This means removing swollen clutter. Sultar extends this metaphor to the environment and identifies CO2 as eco-chametz that needs to be removed. Also, the things that we buy that we do not need which eventually ends up in landfills could be considered eco-chametz.

• and the Maror, which are bitter herbs. The bitter herbs symbolize the suffering of slavery. Sultar writes that for this generation, it should represent the harm of our actions today.

This is a creative use of religious symbolism to raise voices against environmental injustice.

More: Green Passover: Now That’s Kosher!

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Rev. Richard Cizik, vice president of the National Association of Evangelicals, has been leading a compaign to instill “creation care” as a religious imperative. He attended the forum and this was his exchange with Barack Obama:

REV. CIZIK: How do you relate your faith to science generally and science policy, and let’s take an issue like climate and flesh that out, or take stem cells, something like that. Just give us a little more indication of how you think.

OBAMA: Well, first of all…

CIZIK: Is that fair enough?

OBAMA: It is fair enough. And you guys have done some terrific work on this. So I want to congratulate you on that.

OBAMA: And should it be part of God’s plan to have me in the White House, I look forward to our collaboration. (LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE)

OBAMA: So, look, the — one of the things I draw from the Genesis story is the importance of us being good stewards of the land, of this incredible gift. And I think there have been times where we haven’t been and this is one of those times where we’ve got to take the warning seriously.

I know that Al Gore was mentioned earlier. By the way, I have to say, I think Al Gore won. And…(APPLAUSE)

OBAMA: And has done terrific work since. But I think that we are seeing enough warning signs for us to take this seriously. And part of what my religious faith teaches me is to take an intergenerational view, to recognize that we are borrowing this planet from our children and our grandchildren.

And so we’ve got this obligation to them, which means that we’ve got to make some uncomfortable choices. And where I think potentially religious faith and the science of global warming converge is precisely because it’s going to be hard to deal with.

We have to find resources in ourselves that allow us to make those sacrifices where we say, you know what? We’re not going to leave it to the next generation. We’re not going to wait.

OBAMA: We are going to put in place a cap-and-trade system that controls the amount of greenhouse gases that are going into the atmosphere. And we know that that requires us to make adjustments in terms of how we use energy. We’ve got to be less wasteful, both as a society and in our own individual lives.

And having faith, believing that this planet and this world extends beyond us, it’s not just here for us, but it’s here for, you know, more generations to come. I think religion can actually bolster our desire to make those sacrifices now. And that’s why, as president, I hope to be able to rally the entire world around the importance of us being good stewards of the land.

Eboo Patel, a Muslim who leads an organization called the Interfaith Youth Core addressed Senator Clinton with the following:

PATEL: Americans of all faiths and no faith at all genuinely believe in compassion and want to apply that in addressing global poverty and climate change. Can we do that without changing our standard of living?

CLINTON: Well, I believe there is so much we can do that we’re not doing that would not change our standard of living as an imposition from the outside, but which would inspire us to take action that would impact how we live.

And I don’t think we would notice it demonstrably undermining our standard of living, but it would give us the opportunity to set an example and to be a model.

When I think about the simple steps any one of us can take — you know, turning off lights when one leaves a room, unplugging appliances, changing to compact florescent bulbs — you know, my husband and I have done that — I don’t think it’s impacted our standard of living, but we feel like we’re making a small contribution to limiting the amount of greenhouse gas emissions, you know, being more mindful of our purchases.

I hope that, as president, I can model that and lead that effort so that people don’t feel so threatened by the changes we’re talking about when it comes to dealing with global warming.

In preparation for the pope’s visit, I was reading that the Vatican is the first carbon-neutral state in the world now. Well, that shows leadership. And I don’t think it has impacted the work or the living. You know, Ambassador Flynn, who was our ambassador to the Vatican, might know. But it was a great statement.

And we can do more.

CLINTON: And I think that, with leadership, people will find ways to take those first steps. And then we can take even more.

Now there’s so much that I have to do as president with the cap and trade system, with moving away from our dependence on foreign oil, but I’m going to look for ways that will cushion the costs on middle class and working and poor people. Because I don’t believe that they should have to bear more than what they are bearing right now as we make this transition. And I believe we can accomplish that.

The forum brought out few contrasts between Obama and Clinton, but it was interesting to watch the candidates jump through the hoops of religious voters. It’s also refreshing to see leaders asking new questions and requiring different “moral values” from candidates in this election.

The Passover seder is a ritual feast that includes symbolic foods telling the story of Israel’s exodus from slavery in Egypt. Meg Dickler-Taylor is the owner of Large Marge Sustainables, and she is catering “The Sustainable Seder” in Los Angeles.

Dickler-Taylor spoke to the Workmen’s Circle, the host of the seder, about ways to incorporate sustainability into their Passover celebration. Her tips included bringing their own bags to the supermarket, using durable plates instead of disposable, and making organic and local food choices.

“Passover is a celebration of a lot of things, primarily the freedom of the Jews [from] enslavement of Egypt. Every year, if we are to create a dynamic civilization, we have to reapply that concept of freedom to what we’re experiencing in our environment right now,” Dickler-Taylor said.

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Candlelit services are nothing new for religious organizations. So when businesses, governments, and individuals turn off their lights Saturday at 8 p.m. local time, churches, synagogues, and mosques will be holding special gatherings. This global event is the second annual Earth Hour, the creation of the World Wildlife Fund to inspire people to take action on climate change.

In Toronto, The Church of the Holy Trinity in conjunction with KAIROS Ecumenical Justice Initiatives will be hosting an event called Songs, Stories, and Ritual for the Healing of the Earth with singing, poetry, and drumming.

In Atlanta, Georgia Interfaith Power and Light is persuading its 120 Christian, Jewish and Buddhist congregations to power down on March 29. The group is part of a national campaign led by Rev. Sally Bingham, that assists congregations in going green by doing free energy audits and offering teaching resources on the environment as a faith issue.

In Sydney, St. Mark’s Anglican Church has been transitioning into an “eco-church” since Earth Hour 2007.

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There is a video available that is worth watching if you have a free hour and, like me, are into this kind of stuff! Otherwise, I will give an overly simplistic summary below.

The basic spiritual crisis we face as individuals is our failure to recognize that the sense of self is a construct. The construct creates a feeling of alienation. This causes us to try to find meaning in accumulating wealth and things to verify our existence, creating further anxiety and sense of lack. The solution to the problem is to realize that the sense of self is indeed a delusion. This results in a caring attitude toward everyone else because of the recognition that we are not separate but part of a whole.

Then Loy parallels the individual’s basic problem with the delusion of humans as a species. Since the ancient Greeks, human beings have thought of themselves as separate from the rest of the natural world. This has resulted in uneasiness about our role in the world. The discomfort causes us to try to verify our existence by endless technological growth for the sake of growth. But this has not eased the anxiety.

The ecological crisis is inevitable because of this need for endless growth. The solution, like the solution for the individual problem, is found in the realization that the human species is not separate from the rest of nature. When the human species recognizes its relationship with the Earth, we can address the need to exploit resources and begin to heal the injuries we’ve caused.

What I think David Loy does well in this lecture is remind us that technology alone is not the answer to ecological destruction. The solution will come from identifying the root of our consumerist and exploitative impulses.

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In light of these statements, Easter celebrators might want to reflect on how the story of Easter relates to the environment.

Theologian Herman-Emiel Mertens writes,

“Those who do not understand the link between the Easter message and ecological problems, do not understand anything of either. Environmentalism in itself is of course no utterance of Easter faith. Many non-Christians are concerned about this. That is only right and proper. A monopolizing of these earthly cares by Christians is out of the question. There is environmentalism without Easter faith, but no Easter faith without environmentalism.” (Not the Cross, but the Crucified, 207)

Easter is, at its core, a very deep holiday about overcoming violence brought on by institutional structures. That is the power of Christ’s resurrection. The holiday is a display of active hope. It’s the enjoyment of a spring afternoon with family and friends in anticipation of a springlike renewal for the environment. Active hope is celebration that motivates creative action for a peaceful future.

What I like about Green Options Media is that every article written is a display of active hope. What we are seeing in the blogosphere is a celebration of creativity in the face of a challenging situation.

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Thanks to Dean A. Current, who has spent years developing methods for sustainable palm harvesting, churches now have a green option for buying palms.

Current is a research associate for University of Minnesota’s Department of Forest Resources. He has worked with Rainforest Alliance to prevent over-harvesting palms each year, make sure less palms are wasted, and give harvesters in Guatemala a fair wage for their efforts. Twenty-five percent of the program’s revenue goes right back into the communities where the palms are harvested.

These eco-palms will find their way to over 2000 congregations around the U.S. This represents less than 2% of the 35 to 40 million palms ordered annually, but the amount is increasing exponentially each year. The effort began with a pilot program of 5000 palms in 2005 and has increased to 600,000.

Not every congregation is crazy about the idea of eco-palms. They cost about twice as much and some people don’t think they’re as pretty as traditional palms. Fair enough, but how much will they cost after over-harvesting takes its toll? Is a slightly longer palm frond really worth putting a community’s livelihood at risk and threatening the health of the forest?

Current hopes more congregations will see the wisdom of using eco-palms on Palm Sunday.

More info:

Palm Sunday Gets Environmentally Friendly, The Minnesota Daily

Churches Go ‘Green’ for Palm Sunday, USA Today

More articles in the Green Lent series:

Spanish Literature and Religious Environmentalism: A Green Lent Update

What Does Lent Have to Do with Sharpening Green Habits?

Photo credit: Flickr, licensed for public and commercial use through Creative Commons.

The Boston Globe published an article today about Nina M. Scott, a retired University of Massachusetts Amherst professor of Spanish Literature. Instead of chocolate, Scott has chosen to give up carbon this Lent. She is doing a few extra things to reduce her carbon footprint, such as hanging her clothes up instead of using a drier and carpooling to use less fuel.

“For me it’s that connection between protecting nature and faith,” she says. She and a dozen of her friends at Grace Episcopal Church in Amherst first got the idea when they heard about two Church of England bishops who encouraged parishioners to go on a low carbon diet for Lent. (Check out my article, “What Does Lent Have to Do With Sharpening Green Habits?”)

The Globe article also mentioned this past weekend’s Yale Divinity School’s conference “Renewing Hope: Pathways to Religious Environmentalism.” This is the conference that screened the film Renewal, which I wrote about last week. The Globe pointed out the conference to illustrate the movement that is taking place, that religions are becoming enlightened to their environmental responsibilities. Sure, the religious environmentalism movement is picking up speed, but it’s certainly not new. Interfaith Power & Light, which is featured in Renewal, founded by the Rev. (now Canon) Sally Bingham, Environmental Minister at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral, has been around for over a decade.

The spiritual wisdom that human beings and nature are intimately connected goes back to the beginning of civilization. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, a Mexican intellectual and playwright, one of Nina M. Scott’s academic specialties and no doubt influences, was a Mexican nun in the 1600s who caused a big stir in Mexico for writing plays criticizing colonialism. She was a member of a group of nuns called Discalced Carmelites, known for being barefoot.

When she challenged the excessive mining for ore and military conquest in the name of God, she was punished by her superiors. Sor Juana’s spirit lives on, not just in feminist literary criticism, but in a religious organization called Santuario Sisterfarm, in my neighborhood (the Central Texas Hill Country). The Sisterfarm calls their mission an “eco-ethno-spiritual quest,” empowering latinas to go deep into their ancestral connection to the land. They practice organic farming and seed storage of non-genetically modified seeds in an ethic of “Earth Care, People Care, and Fair Share.” They also run a publishing house called Sor Juana Press.

The term “religious environmentalism” may be new, but the spiritual wisdom is old. Religious environmentalism is uncovering these ancient traditions, and it’s good to see it getting more press these days.

Bartholomew first earned his reputation with the statement, “Crime against the natural world is a sin.” His grandest endeavor was inviting 200 scientists, journalists, and political leaders to hang out with him on a cruise ship. They traveled around the Adriatic Sea to observe the ecological degradation taking place. During the symposium, he persuaded Pope John Paul II to adopt his agenda.

This achievement symbolized what he has been able to do, bringing together the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church, as well as the scientific and religious communities. Both of these pairs have found themselves in opposition to one another, but Bartholomew I describes his work as the “green bridge” uniting everyone, religious and non-religious. He has received a U.S Congressional Gold Medal and the Sophie Prize for his efforts.

There is a conciliar process to select Bartholomew I’s successor, much like the Roman Catholic Church’s selection of popes. The future of the office is uncertain right now, however, due to the dwindling number of Orthodox Christians in Turkey and restrictions that the Turkish government places on who can be Patriarch. There has been discussion of moving the office to another country, after nearly seventeen centuries in Constantinople. It will be interesting to see whether the next Ecumenical Patriarch, wherever he happens to be located, continues the green mission of his predecessor.

Bartholomew I was #1 in Grist’s “15 Green Religious Leaders” last July.

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“‘We are the ones who are late to the table,’ [Rev. Joel] Hunter said. An emerging national evangelical leader on environmental issues, Hunter said the goal of the conference was to ‘get mutually stirred up’ and to ‘assume stewardship’ of this issue.”

Evangelical leaders gathered at Northland, a Church Distributed to hammer out “creation care.” If these green evangelicals are beginning to embrace terms like “sustainable,” “green,” and even “carbon neutral,” but still shudder at the sound of “environmentalism,” are we really all sitting at the same table? Or are we sitting at completely different tables, looking at the same evidence, but pretending to ignore each other’s solutions?

The elephant in the room is the rocky relationship between environmentalists and evangelicals. Both have a history of dismissing one another; environmentalists for being anti-religious and misanthropic, and evangelicals for intolerance and anthropocentrism. The rivalry has dissolved, probably because the mounting evidence of global warming has hit a critical level of importance for just about every household in America, across the political spectrum.

As someone who has been a part of both conversations, I have some constructive ideas for both parties if we are going to sit together.

Evangelicals should be familiar with Lynn White, Jr.’s groundbreaking essay, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis.” White makes the assertion that Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has ever seen. The belief that “nature has no reason for existence save to serve man” has played a role in the utter disregard for the planet. Humble pie is on the menu, and evangelicals need to be able to admit that people outside their circles have something to teach them with regard to morality.

Environmentalists must recognize the amount of influence that religion has. If substantial progress is to be made, we will have to work together. Inroads have been made. With more evangelicals seeing the need for environmental responsibility, they are working alongside secular groups in clean-up projects and public policy efforts (Scroll to “Evangelical leaders join scientists to fight global warming“). Amidst all the dirt and sweat, new relationships are being forged.

If we are all going to sit at the same table and talk about the future, we need to be familiar with each other’s language. The word “stewardship” implies ownership of the Earth’s resources as well as human priority and should be used carefully outside of Sunday morning worship. “Creation care” sounds like the Earth is a damsel in distress in need of a knight in shining armor. We can’t forget that the planet did OK taking care of itself for billions of years before humans took over.

I have hope that we can work together for a better future, but we can’t ignore one another’s efforts.

So what does this table look like? Tree-huggers look a lot different than they used to. Has the message been diluted or enhanced now that the evangelicals have arrived?

Photo credit: Flickr; licensed for commercial use through Creative Commons.

These are just a handful of the stories told by veteran filmmakers Terry Kay Rockefeller and Marty Ostrow in their upcoming documentary, Renewal.

RENEWAL is the first feature-length documentary to capture the breadth and vitality of America’s religious-environmental movement. In rural communities, suburbs and cities, people of faith are rolling up their sleeves in practical and far-reaching ways. Offering a profound message of hope, RENEWAL shows individuals and communities driven by the deepest source of inspiration - their spiritual and religious convictions - being called to re-examine what it means to be human and how we live on this planet .

(from renewalproject.net)

This evening marks the premiere at Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the first of seven screenings. Next weekend, Yale University’s Forum on Religion and Ecology is hosting a conference which will screen the film. Renewal has also been selected to be featured at the Atlanta Film Festival in April.

The Renewal Project wants to see secular and religious groups build partnerships that will strengthen their efforts. They are looking for clergy, congregational networks, environmental activists, local governments, civic organizations, scholars and theologians to join The Renewal Circle. Members of The Renewal Circle get advance copies of the film to share with their organizations and tips on how to work with the film.

In the news: today’s Boston Globe review of the film.

Photo: courtesy of Flickr, licensed for public use through Creative Commons.